One of the most frequent questions we hear from small business owners is “why did my domain authority go down?” The question has more than one answer. If you are a business owner or an entrepreneur with a website, then your domain authority is critical to the success of your business and website. You’ve likely heard of Domain Authority (DA) scores before, and you probably know that DA comes up a lot in search engine optimization (SEO). However, you might not be entirely sure about what it is and how it works. We’re going to talk about all the reasons your domain authority may have gone down, how to boost your scores and how to reduce spam scores.
Who created Domain Authority, and why does a high score matter?
Domain Authority (DA) is a 1 to 100 score created by Moz, an SEO software company, to predict how likely a website is to rank in search results compared with other sites.
While learning how to check website health, you’ve likely come across domain authority. Moz built Domain Authority as a prediction score, not as a ranking platform, and DA is not a Google ranking factor. Moz provides search marketing, web-data visualizations, tracking, and other SEO-related insights. Initially started by Gillian Muessig and her son Rand Fishkin by way of a blog called “SEOMoz.” The company began in Seattle, Washington, and today Moz predicts how likely websites are to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
What factors does Moz use to calculate Domain Authority?
Moz bases DA mainly on how many different websites link to yours and how trustworthy those linking sites are.
Moz has changed its DA formula over the years, and some of the metrics below (MozRank and MozTrust) are older Moz link scores. Here are the factors most often discussed:
- MozRank – MozRank scored your site’s external links by analyzing the number of links that point back to your website, and the overall quality of the links. Quality trumps quantity, which means that a single good external link is far better than two links that are of lower quality.
- MozTrust – MozTrust also judged your external link quality. MozTrust was more specific, because it measured how closely connected your site is to trusted websites (gov or edu sites). And when one of those sites links to another site that links to you, it’s a sign of trust that can help increase your MozTrust rating.
- Linking Root Domains – Linking root domains are the number of unique websites that link to yours. For example, if your website obtains 20 external links from two separate websites, you’ve earned two linking root domains. Therefore, earning just a few links from different websites boosts your ranking more than if you have made numerous links from a single website.
- Search Engine Amiability – Search engine amiability means using sound SEO principles for your website’s overall structure and user-friendliness. Your site structure directly affects usability, and poor site structure can make your site hard to navigate. Poor structure can also make your website harder for search engines to crawl and index, which hurts your rankings.
- Quality Content – High-quality content helps your search rankings directly, and it helps your DA indirectly, because useful content earns links from other websites.
- Social Signals – Likes, comments and shares do not feed directly into your DA score. Content that gets shared widely does tend to earn more links, and links are what Moz counts.
What is a Good DA Score?
A good DA score is one that is higher than the scores of the sites you compete with for the same searches.
DA scores range from 1 to 100, and DA is a comparative score, so there is no single number that counts as good for every business. A higher score means Moz predicts your site is more likely to rank, but raising DA does not by itself raise your traffic.
(Image Credit: Digital Third Coast)
What DA scores do the biggest websites have?
The biggest websites, like Google, YouTube and LinkedIn, score at or near the top of the 1 to 100 scale.
Major news publishers also score very high. Moz scores shift over time, so check Moz Link Explorer for any site’s current number. Here are a few worldwide examples of sites near the top of the scale:
- The Guardian
- BBC News
- support.google.com
- youtube.com
- www.google.com
- linkedin.com
- www.blogger.com
Should you compare your DA to your competitors?
Yes, compare your DA with the direct competitors in your market, not with giant sites like Google or the BBC.
Comparing your site to super-high-ranking websites tells you very little.
Instead, you should be focusing on research to discover your direct competitors’ scores. If your competitors currently have DA scores in the 30s or 40s, a score of 52 puts you ahead of them. So, to determine whether you have a great DA score, simply compare yours to your competitors. If yours is higher, amazing, but if it happens to be lower, you have some work to do.
(Image Credit: Ahrefs)
How can you improve your Domain Authority?
You improve DA by earning links from more unique, trustworthy websites and by cleaning up links that hurt you.
You can boost your DA score by:
- Carrying out a website link audit of your site
- Gaining several quality backlinks
- Having unlinked mentions
- Improving your internal links
- Publishing linkable content
- Learning how to reduce your spam score
- Never buying links: Google’s spam policies treat exchanging money, goods or services for links as link spam, unless the link is marked rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”
How often does Moz update Domain Authority?
Moz updates DA as its link index picks up new and lost links, so your score can move even when nothing on your site has changed.
Your DA can drop when you lose links, when competing sites gain links faster than you do, or when Moz changes how it calculates the score. Check your DA after any major change to your site and on a regular schedule, so a drop never catches you by surprise.
Which tools show your Domain Authority?
Moz shows DA in its Link Explorer, its free MozBar browser toolbar and the SERP Analysis section of its Keyword Explorer.
Learning how to check website health and domain authority is important for any small business owner. With any of the Moz tools above, you can keep tabs on your own DA score and those of your competitors.
What is a Spam Score?
Spam Score is a Moz metric that estimates what percentage of sites with features like yours Moz found penalized or banned by Google.
Moz shows Spam Score as a percentage. A high spam score doesn’t necessarily mean that a site is actually “spammy.” Spam Score is a guide for spotting sites that may need a closer look. You can check Spam Score in Moz Link Explorer, and some free third-party checkers will show DA for a list of URLs at once. The diib dashboard offers tips on how to reduce your spam score. For instance:
(Image Credit: 2 Dogs Media)
How does Moz calculate Spam Score?
Moz uses a machine learning model that checks 27 signals about a site itself and compares them with sites Google has penalized or banned.
Moz rates a Spam Score of 1% to 30% as low, 31% to 60% as medium and 61% to 100% as high. A high score is a correlation, not proof that a site is spammy, and it means your site deserves a closer look. Spam Score is not calculated from the Spam Scores of sites that link to you. Moz updates it quarterly, and it changes only when Moz detects changes to those 27 signals.
How do you diagnose and fix a DA or ranking drop?
Start by ruling out basic problems like an expired domain or hosting, then check Google Search Console, recent site changes and your backlinks.
DA is a Moz score, so a DA drop does not always mean your Google rankings fell. If your Google traffic did drop, Google’s guide to debugging drops in Search traffic lists the main causes: technical issues, security issues, spam issues, algorithm updates, seasonality and site moves.
So, if you’re still asking yourself “why did my domain authority go down?” Or “why did my ranking drop suddenly?” Just know, there are plenty of reasons for why this is happening; however, no matter what the reason or reasons, let’s face it, any rankings drop could end up costing you money. The key here is that the rankings fluctuate, so don’t panic. Before doing anything else, be sure to start by checking the following:
- Your domain may have expired,
- Your hosting might have expired,
- Your web host had an error and isn’t even displaying your site.
(Believe it or not, these things happen all the time!)
Next, work through these checks:
- Make sure your site is functioning properly,
- Confirming the fact that your traffic is dropping,
- Checking for errors or warnings on the Google Search Console,
- Reviewing any recent changes,
- Checking Google’s list of ranking updates for any recent changes,
- Identifying precisely what has fallen and when,
- Checking to see whether you’re being outranked,
- Checking your backlinks’ profile,
- Studying your on-page factors,
- Checking on your SEO activities.
Here’s how you can repair your score to recover from a DA score drop:
- By acquiring only high-quality backlinks that come from authority sites.
- By remembering that backlinks play a significant role in calculating DA.
- By improving your score via the creation of killer link-worthy content.
- By removing harmful backlinks where you can (this does not change your Moz Spam Score, which is based on signals about your own site, and Moz cannot see links you disavow in Google).
- By optimizing the structure of your website to enhance the user experience.
- By improving your website’s internal links.
Which website changes can affect your DA?
Big backend changes, such as a new theme, plugin updates or a new URL structure, can break pages that other sites link to, and those lost links can pull your DA down.
Several things are often changed in a website’s backend that could affect your DA score. Do any of these potential website changes sound familiar? If you’ve recently made any changes, they could be affecting your score, including:
- New plugins,
- Existing plugin updates,
- New website theme,
- Any new pages added,
- Significant URL structural changes (like moving your blog).
How do you check your website health and SEO strategy?
Run a regular SEO audit that crawls your site, checks your page titles and descriptions, and gives each page one main topic and keyword.
Your site’s SEO and website health are also significant factors when mapping out your online success plan. Knowing how to check website health and make an actionable plan can be overwhelming. Here are actionable steps to improve your SEO and website health:
- Using an on-page SEO checklist,
- Crawling your site,
- Conducting an SEO audit and defining your website architecture,
- Updating your meta descriptions, page titles, and URLs,
- Making sure your main keyword is included in your URL,
- Including your keywords throughout your pages,
- Tracking the topics and keywords for each page,
- Never engaging in keyword stuffing.
How can diib help you track and recover your DA?
diib monitors your backlinks, technical SEO and site health in one dashboard and tells you in plain English what to fix next.
We hope we’ve answered your question “why did my domain authority go down?” Now that you have some basic info on DA rankings and methods for checking yours be sure not to panic if your score becomes stagnant or drops considerably. You can work your way back using the methods above. diib is built to help websites like yours track their domain authority and improve their overall web presence. Here are a few of the features of our user dashboard you’re sure to appreciate:
- Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
- Blacklist monitoring and objectives for repair
- Core Web Vitals monitoring
- Bounce rate monitoring and repair
- Facebook and Instagram Insights (post clicks, page visits and more) and YouTube video performance
- Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
- Technical SEO monitoring
Click here for your free 60-second site scan. diib members also get diibLive office hours with our growth experts.
